That photographic media, in one way or the other, record, depict and represent truth, realities and the past, is a staple. In theory this relation has been called into question, in particular with the advent of digital image manipulation, and the doubts have been extended since to analogue photography, too. Yet despite these doubts the notion of photographs being somewhat true permeates most, if not all, practices with these media: in science and humanities, photographic images replace and represent the object of research; in an ID, the portrait connects a face and a body with a name and other personal data; photographs in family albums and books allow to look back into the past. And though it may have been the reason for recent doubts in photography’s veracity, digital photography thrives on this promise as well: we share meals with our social networks the moment they are served, video telephony lets us talk not only to a voice but a face, and GPS metadata tells us where on Earth we took a certain picture. Moreover, photography is hybridized when the camera in our smartphones becomes a scanner for QR-codes, drones are equipped with face-recognition software, and augmented reality systems transform the material world into a space and surface for digital data.

Under these conditions, photography has ceased to be a specific medium generating still images. It has become a dispositif in the sense of being a network of applications, institutions, materialisations and theoretical settings such as its privileged relation in representing truth – which, looking back, it has always been. The discussions concerning the re-evaluation of photography, however, usually give most attention to individual pictures as products and as depictions. What we would like to focus upon with our next conference are the modes of the technical, optical, chemical and social conditions of pre-, post-, mass and over-production, of the distribution, consumption, circulation and archiving of what is so commonly known as photographs. We welcome in particular submissions concerned with new theoretical and empirical approaches and perspectives on these fields. And we would be delighted to receive papers dealing with rarely researched topics such as photographic optics, photochemistry and the applications of soft- and hardware for generating photorealistic images. We plan to arrange the talks in four panels:

Ça eu été? What photography has been and will become.

What is needed. The material bases of photography

How to use them. Production, dissemination, application and perception of photographic images

What else is new? Photographic practices at the fringes of photography.

Please submit your application, including a short summary of your paper (250-400 words) in English using the following link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=app4 no later than 20 December 2017. Note that you should register at the Easychair website in order to submit your application. There is no participation fee.

We shall consider the possibility of online participation for a limited number of participants. The working languages of the conference are Russian and English. Conference materials are planned for publication in 2018-2019. For programs of After Post-Photography since 2015 and past publications, please see http://www.after-post.photography

We would appreciate it if you would circulate the call to your own networks and other mailing lists.